Site Mobile Navigation

Inside the Incubators of Innovation

“True Innovation,” by Jon Gertner (Sunday Review, Feb. 26), is a wonderful paean to the accomplishments of Bell Labs, but before we try to bring back those glory days, we must ask ourselves: Was there more total innovation when the AT&T monopoly financed the labs, or was there more after the January 1984 divestiture?

If you are using a computer, a smartphone or the Internet to look that up, the question answers itself.

As its seven Nobel prizes confirm, there is no doubt that Bell Labs was the home of great science. Yet its existence was predicated on an implicit tax foisted on the nation’s phone bills by its monopoly.

The issue, thus, is not “Did Bell Labs innovate?” — for surely it did — but rather “Is the business model that supported Bell Labs most conducive to innovation?”

JOSEPH BERNSTEIN
Haverford, Pa., Feb. 26, 2012

To the Editor:

Jon Gertner rightly draws attention to the incredible legacy of innovation at Bell Labs. In contrast, it is surprisingly difficult to point to even one fundamental technological innovation from Microsoft, Apple, Google or Facebook.

These superstar companies are in fact living off a legacy brought to us by a mix of government or military programs and monopolies or industry behemoths: Bell Labs, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, NASA, I.B.M., Intel, Xerox, Texas Instruments and university research largely done more than 30 years ago.

Microsoft has always been a late adaptor and repackager of technology, beginning with the original MS-DOS. Apple is innovative in terms of product design — beauty and elegance — but is just a user of basic technology. Google’s main innovation was to link advertising to search. Facebook is the accidental beneficiary of the natural tendency for people to gather at a common location.

The innovations of today’s modern titans of technology have more in common with the “innovations” of the financial industry — juggling, renaming and rebranding existing technologies in a way that maximizes profit. One wonders what this portends for the future of real technology in the United States.

Photo

Credit
Luke Ramsey

ERIC LINDEMANN
Boulder, Colo., Feb. 27, 2012

The writer is a digital signal processing engineer.

To the Editor:

Jon Gertner’s portrayal of Bell Labs and its research culture was eminently familiar to those of us who have spent parts of our careers within its labs and corridors. This institution continues to be the destination of choice for a remarkable number of graduates from the world’s pre-eminent research universities and a wellspring of communications technologies leadership.

Mr. Gertner succeeds in explaining how the Bell Labs values and research paradigm that held sway in the past gave rise to so much of our information age of today. I would offer that most of those elements remain in place today. And so does the flow of innovations. For example, we are making remarkable progress on a potentially revolutionary technology to move us beyond the approaching limits of the optical transport systems that make up the foundation of the Internet.

This is why I’m so amazed to see the occasional past tense reference in conjunction with Bell Labs. We continue to retool our research capacity to explore promising new technologies for the future.

JEONG KIM
President, Bell Labs
Murray Hill, N.J., Feb. 28, 2012

To the Editor:

As Jon Gertner points out, the financial model once used by Bell Labs — using its telephone monopoly to finance its extraordinary scientific and engineering innovations — is no longer available. Instead, the significant economic benefits that individual consumers have gained through deregulation and globalization in terms of lower prices and more product choices have also led to a reduction in much of the basic research, the engine for creating new industries and for driving our economic growth, that corporations once conducted.

That is why it is more important than ever that we as a nation increase our investment in basic research. By wisely investing a portion of the collective savings we have enjoyed as consumers, we can build our future prosperity. And while charities continue to have an extremely important role to play in this process, government must continue to lead, and must increase its contribution.

But that investment must truly be in basic research and not tied to the applications of any specific company, industry or social goal, no matter how laudable.

RICH WOHL
Morristown, N.J., Feb. 28, 2012

To the Editor:

Jon Gertner reminds us that great institutions like Bell Labs have made extraordinary contributions to increased prosperity with inventions in computing, communication and more. Less known is that scientists at Bell Labs also helped protect the stratospheric ozone layer with technology to avoid chlorofluorocarbon solvents.

Industry and governments accomplished this by working together under the Montreal Protocol, an international treaty to protect the ozone layer, thereby avoiding millions of cases of skin cancer, cataracts and other health problems.

Scientists from Bell Labs were part of a consortium of electronic, aerospace and weapons experts who invented, patented and donated to the public domain a technology called “no-clean soldering” that eliminated ozone-depleting solvents, cut other hazardous manufacturing waste, increased product reliability and saved literally billions of dollars in manufacturing costs.

Bravo to Bell Labs and the success it inspires!

STEPHEN O. ANDERSEN
Barnard, Vt., Feb. 27, 2012

The writer helped implement the Montreal Protocol as an official of the Environmental Protection Agency.

A version of this letter appears in print on March 5, 2012, on page A18 of the New York edition with the headline: Inside the Incubators of Innovation. Today's Paper|Subscribe